Unless you happen to be one of those rare agencies with multiple brands, products or locations, LinkedIn’s new Showcase Pages won’t mean a whole lot for you. But your clients may be able to make use of this new feature introduced this morning.
Three years after launching company pages, LinkedIn has now made it possible for a business to add multiple subsections to these pages. Until today, the best a company could do was create separate company pages for each of its brands, or make-do with the four tab categories LinkedIn offers: Overview, Products & Services,Careers, and Insights.
Companies with multiple divisions or brands would more usually create a separate page for each. So a company like Yum has separate pages for its KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut brands (among others). It’s Yum corporate site is a skeleton.
LinkedIn hopes companies will aggregate all their brands under a single corporate heading, creating a “Showcase Page” for each different brand. Marketers will decide whether to do that or, as seems more likely, keep the separate brand pages and also add Showcase Pages.
How much value this offers corporate recruiters is a little fuzzy, especially since all jobs will still be displayed for now under the “Careers” tab. However, the Showcase Pages will give recruiters a greater opportunity to tell the story of specific divisions.
For example, LinkedIn itself has created separate Showcase Pages for its three divisions: Talent solutions, Marketing solutions, and Sales Solutions. Each section has its own custom content and updates.
Joseph Roualdes, senior manager of corporate communications for LinkedIn Talent Solutions, said one feature recruiters will especially appreciate will be the ability to communicate directly with those who “follow” their showcase page — or any company page. In addition to launching Showcase Pages, LinkedIn also announced Talent Updates, a convenience feature for recruiters.
When a Company page administrator enables the feature, recruiters can directly post updates to followers of the company directly from the recruiter dashboard. Besides posting to all the followers, recruiters can target updates selectively.